This book is the male counterpart to Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, also edited by Kate Bernheimer. I have not read Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, but I assume that, like Brothers and Beasts, it is neither retellings nor interpretations of contributors’ favorite fairy tales but instead short autobiographical recollections on the significance of familiar tales to their lives. As many contributors to Brothers and Beasts recount, fairy tales helped them grow up, especially in the face of familial travails. These essays thereby bear out Bruno Bettelheim’s classic advocacy (in The Uses of Enchantment, 1976) of fairy tales as means of accepting the world rather than of escaping from it.
Rather than actually interpreting the fairy tale of their choice, most contributors simply parallel it to a situation in their own lives. Strictly, then, they are contending not that the meaning of fairy tales is universal but only that fairy tales have analogues to the lives of readers. For example, David Schwartz observes that in “The Bremen Town Musicians” both the animals and the robbers deem the house over which they are fighting a safe, comfortable abode. He parallels their common view to that of him and his father when, during his adolescence, the two of them were continually at odds while still under the same roof.
A few essays do offer interpretations. By straining, Greg Bills manages to read “Jack and the Beanstalk” as an expression of the relationship between a gay son and his father, symbolized by the Giant. Eric Kraft, also focusing on “Jack and the Beanstalk,” takes the beanstalk to be the ladder of fortune, which is responsible for the happy outcome of the story.
Most, though not quite all, contributors conform to the title of the collection and write about fairy tales with animals in them. Why fairy tales so often involve animals, no contributor considers. And instead of seeing animals as symbols of humans, the contributors tend to leave them as animals.
For me, the most substantial essays are those several that consider the genre itself of fairy tales. Norman Lock, in his four-page “The Fairy Tale as X-Ray of the World Out of Joint,” contrasts fairy tales to both parables and fables. Where parables and fables are “depictions of the world as we know it” and teach morality, fairy tales are fantasies and are about “the world at its most out of joint” (94). The tales provide “intimations...of forgotten attitudes toward the world--its dangers and forbidden pleasures” (93).
More substantial is the equally short essay on “Tale, Myth, Writer” by the best-known contributor, Robert Coover. “Tale is the underbelly of myth. Myth is head, tale body; myth power, tale resistance; myth nice, tale naughty; myth structure, tale flow; myth king, tale fool; myth sacred, tale profane; myth father, tale child; ...myth tragic, tale comic” (57). And so he proceeds--with distinctions that, if sometimes quite standard and other times too rigid, offer apt criteria for categorizing stories. He then pits the Writer against both myths and fairy tales. The chief tool of the Writer is irony, which eludes both of them.
To confer academic authority on the collection, the editor enlists two professional heavyweights: Maria Tatar, who provides a foreword, and Jack Zipes, who provides an afterword. As brief as their contributions are, they confirm the claim made by the editor in her own introduction and in the essays themselves: that fairy tales are more than saccharine escapes from the ills of the real world, that fairy tales are intended as much for boys as for girls, that fairy tales have been written and collected by men more than by women, and that fairy tales can be appreciated by adults as well as children--even if the subject of fairy tales remains that of growing up. At the same time there is no attempt to peg some tales as meant for boys and peg others as meant for girls.
The writing in this collection is uniformly nimble. Would that academic writing were so sprightly. As a contribution to the study of fairy tales, this book is slight. It illustrates rather than advances the view of Bettleheim, who himself asserts dogmatically that fairy tales are written from a neutral rather than either a male or a female viewpoint. But then the aim of this endearing book is to demonstrate, not to analyze, the appeal of fairy tales to males and not just to females.
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[Review length: 746 words • Review posted on April 16, 2008]